Where it all began

Britain adopted the Balfour Declaration on 2 November 1917, and this and other, contradictory, promises ensured the start, and continuation, of the Palestinian conflict

by Alain Gresh

In the period 1917-39, a world collapsed. Age-old empires – the Ottoman, the Austro-Hungarian – did not survive the first world war. Tsarist Russia was already dead, the Bolsheviks were about to take the Winter Palace.

Lord Arthur James Balfour, foreign secretary of the British Empire, put the last touches to his letter on 2 November 1917, and hesitated whether to add his signature. The text, the Balfour Declaration, had been much debated within His Majesty’s government; it “favourably envisages the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people and every effort will be employed to facilitate the realisation of this objective”. The declaration, which in a first version mentioned “the Jewish race”, specified that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country”. How to create a Jewish national home without affecting local Arabs? Britain was never able to resolve this contradiction and it was the source of the longest conflict that the contemporary world has known.

The Balfour letter was addressed to Lord Walter Rothschild, a representative of British Judaism, close to the Zionists (who were calling for a rebirth of the Jewish people and a return to Palestinian soil). The Declaration met several preoccupations of the UK government. It gained the sympathy of global Jewry, perceived as possessing considerable power, a vision not too far from that of anti-semites who detected the “hand of the Jews” everywhere.

The British prime minister, David Lloyd George, wrote in his memoirs of the power of “the Jewish race”, guided by financial interests, and Lord Balfour had been the promoter, in 1905, of a project of a law on the limitation of immigration to Britain, aimed at Russian Jewry. Mark Sykes, a negotiator of the accords that partitioned the Middle East in 1916, wrote to an Arab leader: “Believe me, for I am sincere when I tell you that this race [the Jews], vile and weak, is hegemonic through the entire world and that one is not able to defeat it. Jews sit in each government, in each bank, in each enterprise.”

Promises, promises

The Declaration was addressed to American Jewry, suspected of sympathy for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and to Russian Jewry, influenced by revolutionary organisations that overturned the Tsar in the spring of 1917. Many were favourable to the idea that Russia should sign a separate peace. London hoped to prevent this desertion. Balfour described the mission that was to be entrusted to the Jews in Palestine: to ensure that the Jews of the world behave appropriately, an intent that failed after 6 November 1917, when insurgent Bolsheviks seized power at Petrograd and demanded an immediate peace.

But Britain, in comforting the Zionist movement, aimed for a more strategic objective, the control of the Middle East. Its dismembering was negotiated between Paris and London, even before victory. In 1916 Paris and London signed the accords known as Sykes-Picot (Mark Sykes and Georges Picot were high-ranking officials, Sykes British, Picot French) that specified the dividing lines and zones of influence within the Middle East. The Tsar ratified this. For London, Palestine protected the flank east of the Suez Canal, the vital link between India and Britain. The patronage accorded to Zionism allowed the British government to gain total control of the Holy Land.

But the British were not content with promises to the Zionist movement. They also made some to Arab leaders. The Ottoman caliph (in authority over the Arab territories of the Middle East and Commander of the Believers) allied himself in 1914 with Germany and Austro-Hungary; he called for a holy war against the infidel. To retaliate, London aroused an Arab revolt, fronted by a religious leader, Hussein bin Ali, then Sharif and Emir of Mecca. In exchange, Hussein won British support for Arab independence. How to reconcile Arab independence and the creation of a Jewish homeland? The Arab revolt became celebrated in a distorted form concocted by a British agent, TE Lawrence (of Arabia).

The Middle East was then partitioned between France and Britain. The League of Nations, created in 1920 and precursor of the United Nations, assembled dozens of states, mostly European. It invented the mandate system, which the League’s Charter defined: “Certain communities, which formerly belonged to the Ottoman Empire, have attained a degree of development such that their existence as independent nations is able to be recognised provisionally, on the condition that the counsels and the assistance of a mandatory power guide their administration until the time when they will be capable of conducting their own affairs.”

On 24 July 1922, the League bestowed on Britain the mandate over Palestine. The text foresaw that the mandatory power would be “responsible for executing the original declaration of 2 November 1917... in favour of the establishment of a homeland for the Jewish people”. The son of Sharif Hussein, controlled by London, installed himself on the thrones of Iraq and Transjordan (created by Britain to the east of the Jordan River), while the Lebanese and Syrian territories fell to France. Egypt, formally independent since 1922, remained under British occupation.

All the actors were then in place: the dominant power, Great Britain, which hoped to maintain control over a strategic region, rich in oil; the Zionist movement, strong from its first great diplomatic success, and organising Jewish immigration to Palestine; the Palestinian Arabs, not yet referred to as Palestinians, who begin to mobilise against the Declaration; the Arab countries under British influence, gradually involved in Palestinian affairs.

See also

Alain Gresh is director of Le Monde diplomatique and a writer and journalist on the Middle East. This extract is taken from his book Israël-Palestine, vérités sur un conflit, chapter 2, Fayard, Paris, 2001; 2007